Scientists Discover Multiple Black Holes, Solving Universe’s Early Puzzle

Black holes are about as mysterious as deep space gets, with plenty of puzzles that scientists have yet to solve. Another mystery is how some supermassive black holes got so massive early in the universe’s lifetime, but a new study may have solved it by proving that there are far more black holes than previously thought.

The study, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, describes how scientists used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to discover black holes they had never seen before. In short, the researchers took pictures of space and compared them to pictures taken in the same places 15 years earlier. They then compared the brightness of other celestial bodies to help them identify more black holes.

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This works because black holes do not have the same brightness all the time. As they eat nearby space objects – a process known as accretion – they temporarily glow as the material is swallowed. Once swallowed, black holes become dim. So, as the researchers looked at the data over 15 years, they were able to focus on the changes in the light of other celestial bodies and identify them as black holes.

“It turns out that there are many times more black holes living in old normal galaxies than we originally thought,” said Matthew Hayes, lead author of the study. “More recent, pioneering work with the James Webb Space Telescope has begun to reach similar conclusions. Overall, we have more black holes than can be formed by direct infall.”

Many black holes help solve the problem

The mystery that scientists couldn’t figure out was how supermassive black holes existed in the first galaxies in the first place. Matthews says that during growth, a black hole produces a large amount of radiation and this limits how fast a black hole can grow. Therefore, there are supermassive black holes from the infancy of the universe that are bigger than they should be since they haven’t had enough time to “eat” enough material to grow that big.

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“Most of these objects appear to be much larger than we thought they could be in the early times – they either expanded much more or grew much faster,” Alice Young, co-author of the study, told NASA.

According to Matthews, the existence of so many black holes opens up the possibility of how they formed as there are too many to be created by the same mechanism.

“Stars form through the gravitational contraction of gas clouds: if significant numbers of dark particles can be captured during the contraction, then the internal structure can be completely changed – and nuclear combustion is prevented,” says Matthews. Growth can therefore continue for many times longer than the lifetime of a normal star, allowing them to become very large.

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In other words, supermassive black holes in the nascent universe could have originated from a dark star accreting matter and eventually collapsed into a supermassive black hole, which would explain why such supermassive black holes existed before they did.

Matthews says the next steps are to use the James Webb Telescope and its increased sensitivity to further study these black holes and find out how many of them actually existed in the early universe.